U2 'Invisible' by Mark Romanek

With the new U2 song Invisible being available for free on Sunday February 2nd to benefit [RED] – and receiving over 3 million downloads globally raising more than $3 million in donations from Bank of America – a 60 second clip of the video appeared in an ad break during Sunday's Superbowl.

Now the video has been released in full today. Directed by Mark Romanek, it's a performance video but it's also technically groundbreaking, thanks to the ingenuity of British creative studio Marshmallow Laser Feast (or MLF), who designed a real-time visual system that captured and analysed U2’s movements as they performed on a stage, allowing the band to generate visuals interactively on a giant LED screen behind them.

MLF - Memo Akten, Robin McNicholas, Barney Steel –  worked with Juliette Larthe and Mark Logue of PRETTYBIRD to realise their concept, which was to create an interactive 3D lighting and video architecture that directly translated the band and audience’s movement into striking video and lighting output.  Then the video was directed by Mark Romanek - utilising world class LD Patrick Dierson – and shot over three days in a hangar in Santa Monica with 1,000 extras. 

“Cameras track the movement of the band and audience and feed that information into the Punkalator, an application developed specifically for this project by MLF,” explains MLF director Robin McNicholas. “This then interfaces with a Green Hippo Media Server and works in sync with Protools and a GrandMA lighting console.”